Sunday, April 21, 2019

The Digital Demon: The Painstaking Reality of Social Media


     We live in the Digital Age, though, not necessarily to the extent of the Matrix.  No one today can deny how integrated technology has become in our daily social practices and proven itself as a major thriving force.  Within the past couple years, my team and I have delved headfirst into the vastness that is known as Social Media - the proverbial society that exists on digital platforms that promote social interaction online.  If you're like us and despise the evils of social media (i.e. the daily narcissism, objectivity, apathy, etc), then you can probably feel the same eye-roll that kicks in when talking about becoming versed in such things.  Still, that hasn't stopped us from understanding this Digital Demon and attempting to whip it into some form of powerful workhorse.  Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (albeit slowly) have pushed to leverage their numbers for businesses, and companies looking to invest or sponsor your brand are looking at those numbers.  Yes, the bane of the Digital Age has become a necessary evil in sales and marketing.

     This year, we hooked up with some Social Media gurus to help us understand more about what it is that's driving droves of companies to push sales in the online marketplace, and the simplest answer we can gather is the "number" of people they pull in.  How many social media accounts do you have?  I counted ours today, including some of our clients' accounts we manage, and between just 2 primary members, we are managing around 16 business accounts on social media (including this one).  There is obvious overlap among our other members, but we're not counting those here.  It's not hard to find people you know that have 3-5 accounts or more on various social media apps.

     People return to what's familiar to them, and overwhelming them with visual stimuli pushes those images into the subconscious, and they integrate into our everyday lives without us realizing it.  We recognize brands, logos, taglines, and designs more easily because of their repeated contact among users.  That means that social media exponentially increases one person's exposure to your brand tenfold in a single day.  Content reigns high as king, and social media has allowed that king a fast and effective method of repeatability at a comparably lower marketing cost.

     What does that mean for us indie filmmakers?  It means both good and bad on either side of the spectrum.  On one hand, the inexpensiveness of social media marketing can technically be done by practically anyone for almost free (hold your cheers).  Some platforms require payments to extend your reach to funnel new clients / consumers, most notably Facebook and more recently Instagram, but it is not absolutely necessary considering it is still free to create accounts on said platforms.  On the other hand, social media is vastly over-saturated with ads, brands, and competitors doing the exact same thing, which means sticking out can be a lot tougher to accomplish without actually paying for extending your reach.  There are already a number of companies that utilize bots to boost their numbers to feed the algorithms of each platform, but they do not necessarily equal sales.

     This, however, can be a blessing in disguise for the creative problem solvers.  Innovation has never had such a readily-available testing ground for your marketing endeavors, and those that keep their creativity sharpened will have the edge above the others.  Analytics on these platforms are quite sophisticated today, so it has become easier for entrepreneurs to pull statistics to see how well or poor their method of marketing is working and shift if necessary.  Either way, it's going to take a lot of real work and time for the newbie that isn't willing to pay for a [social media] marketing company to do the work for them.

     I feel that social media will always leave a horrible taste in our mouths until we can all learn to treat others like people again and remember that there are actual people behind the profiles, not just some digital front.  Until then, the best we can do is adapt, adjust, and overcome the best we can.  There's a lot more to leveraging social media for sales, but that's a much longer conversation.


NOTE: If you'd like to have a more in depth conversation about the intricacies of social media, visit our website at: www.hydehooliganfilms.com and book an appointment with us.



Written by: J. Hooligan



#digitaldemon #socialmedia #indie #indiefilm #filmmaker #indiefilmmaker #business #sales #marketing 

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